The Automation of Antihumanism

Last week’s post on gay frogs and cosmic horror was the first of what will be several follow-ups to my modestly viral August thread on X arguing that the “obligatory dogma of humanities academia is antihumanism.” I pointed this out because the unifying function of antihumanism is something right-wing critics tend to miss. In academe, “you [can] be a feminist, Marxist, postcolonialist, etc,” as I wrote, “but the thing you [aren’t] supposed to be was a humanist.” The fact that this is the unifying credo of the humanities is part of the point: Their guiding ethos long ago became all-consuming internal critique. Two examples I like to cite are the 1992 book Against Literature, written by—you guessed it—a literature professor, and the 2020 essay “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn,” published in—of course—anthropology’s top journal.